Born: 1915, United States
Died: Unknown
Country most active: United States
Also known as: Blanche Rachel Levine
This biography is shared from The Dictionary of Art Historians, part of the Duke Digital Art History and Visual Culture Research Lab, in line with the Creative Commons licensing. See below for full attribution.
Classicist and curator at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, 1942-1967. Levine was the daughter of Samuel Levine and Bertha Nanes (Levine). She attended Wayne University (the modern Wayne State University) between 1932 and 1934 before switching to New York University. She graduated with a B. F. A in 1936, continuing for her master’s degree at the university’s Institute of Fine Arts with a thesis on Greek painted grave stelai, written under Karl Leo Heinrich Lehmann in 1938. She married the art historian Milton W. Brown the same year. She taught as an instructor at Vassar College and Hunter College during these years. In 1941, she and her husband, a nascent Americanist, bought a car and toured the United States seeking out American art for his upcoming book. Returning to New York, she joined the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, as a lecturer in 1942 while her husband and other museums staff served in the military. Assigned to the ancient collection, she worked closely with the Yale paleographer C Bradford Welles (1901-1969). Under the curator of Greek and Roman Art, Gisela M. A. Richter, she studied the collections carefully. She continued to work on her Ph.D. at the NYU on the collection of the Ptolomaic grave stelai at the Museum. Richter and museum director Francis Henry Taylor funded additional research in Egypt and Italy. Her degree was granted in 1967, her dissertation, Ptolemaic Paintings and Mosaics and the the Alexandrian Style published by the American Institute of Archaeology. The dissertation was supervised by Peter von Blanckenhagen and her readers included the distinguished classical-subject art historians Dorothy Burr Thompson and Dietrich von Bothmer. She had been appointed an associate professor at New York University in 1966, advancing to professor of art in 1973. She was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1977.
Work cited
“Brown, Blanche R..” Dictionary of Art Historians (website). https://arthistorians.info/brownb/.